How to Reverse Engineer Your Content Marketing Plan
Justin Champion is a content marketing professor for HubSpot, the content marketing automation aficianados. In his DMC presentation, he dug in deep on the topic of reverse engineering your content marketing and gave an actionable processes SEMers can apply to their next content marketing campaign.
Content marketing is a growing trend across businesses in every vertical. Justin talked about how many businesses face significant roadblocks on the path to content marketing success. Here are four specific roadblocks you may have encountered along the way:
- Limited bandwidth
- Not sure how to communicate brand story/message across multiple channels
- Have a hard time creating content on a consistent basis
- Unable to connect everything
To overcome these roadblocks Justin recommends making content marketing a business-wide initiative (Step 1). But if internal roadblocks aren’t enough of a challenge, Justin talked about the challenges marketers face today in reaching their customers, specifically the buyer’s journey. “Most people don’t care about your company; they want to know what’s in it for them. You need to create content for each part of the buyer’s journey.”
Understanding your buyer and their journey are paramount to a marketer’s success (Step 2). Justin introduced that idea that a retrograde analysis can help you develop a better understanding of how to get your customer’s attention, how to engage them in the buying journey, and how to earn their business (Step 3). Here are some of the advantages of retrograde analysis from the perspective of a content marketer.
- Pre-promotion plan for your content
- Helps create a sustainable content creation process
- Directly connects short-term content activities to long-term content goals
Once you’ve completed an analysis of where you want to take your buyer and how you’ll get them there Justin prescribes a simple, eight step process to get your content marketing efforts off the ground.
- Have a content theme that supports your business goals.
- Create a list of supporting topics
- Decide which supporting topics are most relevant
- Create blog post for each supporting topic
- Integrate distribution channels by telling the same story through a different lense
- Download or create a template for your guide
- Recycle blog content and format into chapter: add an introduction and a conclusion
- Update call-to-action on every blog post to promote guide
Once you’ve jump-started your content creation Justin recommends building a simple conversion funnel (Step 4). The best conversion funnels are pleasant and provide a manageable experience.
Finally, to get the most out your new-found content marketing efforts Justin preaches the value of content repurposing (Step 5). “Think of yourself like a multipurpose minimalist,” encouraged Champion.
Justin’s presentation was chock-full of actionable advice every aspiring content marketer would benefit from. One of the highlights of his presentation was the sample campaign he and his wife put together around the topic of tiny-house living. Check out his neat DIY guide on turning a truck into a mobile camp they put together using these same processes!
Enjoy the recording!